e must flutter away, so that
friendship, clear-eyed and wise, may step in. There will come moments
when wills clash and desires do not chime; these must be moments of
sober thought and compromise, when one or the other sacrifices self on
the altar of their nascent friendship. Upon this ability to compromise
depends their married happiness. Returning to the rationality which they
forsook during mating-time, they cannot live a joint rational existence
without compromising. If they be compatible, they will gradually grow to
fit, each with the other, into the common life; compromise, on certain
definite points, will become automatic; and for the rest they will
exhibit a tacit and reasoned recognition of the imperfections and
frailties of life.

All this reason will dictate. If they be incapable of rising to
compromise, sacrifice, and unselfishness, reason will dictate
separation. In such cases, when they will have become rational once
more, they will reason the impossibility of a continued relation and
give it up. In which case the true-love disciple may contend that there
was no real love in the beginning. But he is wrong. It was just as real
as that of any marriage, only it failed in the post-nuptial quest after
compatibility. In all marriages love--passionate, romantic love--must
disappear, to be replaced by conjugal affection or by nothing. The
former are the happy marriages, the latter the mistaken ones.

As I close, the saying of La Bruyere comes to me, "The love which arises
suddenly takes longest to cure." This generalisation upon all the
love-affairs within the scope of a single lifetime cannot but be true,
and it is quite in line with the general argument. I have shown that the
love (so called) which grows slowly is akin to friendship, that it is
friendship, in fact, conjugal friendship. On the other hand, the more
sudden a love the more intense it must be; also the less rationality can
it have. And because of its intensity and unreasonableness, the longer
period must elapse ere its frenzy dies out and cool, calm thought comes
in.

HERBERT.

P.S.--My book is out--"The Economic Man." I send it to you. I cannot
imagine you will care for the thing.

XXI

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
May 26, 19--.

"Pretty nineteen-year-old Louisa Naveret, because her slower-minded
fiance, Charles J. Johnson, could not understand a joke, is dying with a
bullet in her brain, and he, h